As I was driving home yesterday evening I heard this story on NPR. It describes a communication strategy used by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.
This is how it works: Someone screams “mic-check” to grab everyone’s attention and get the people’s mic started. The speaker will then say something, for instance, “Thank you for your patience tonight,” which the crowd repeats. This goes on until the speaker is finished.
The article quotes Sheila Nichols describing mic check’s uniquely participatory character:
[The] people’s mic forces people to be participatory, to listen, to understand that we’re in it together… And it’s an active experience that forces people to be a part of something that’s a whole…It’s sort of an undefined, decentralized experience overall, which is what makes it an amazing and unique experience.
Participatory, undefined, decentralized… I’m not so sure. Does any voice have the privilege of the public mic? Or is there an explicit or tacit understanding within the group regarding who are the leaders to whom the group will grant its collective voice?
Here is an example of “mic check” in action, in the “pepper spray” incident at UC Davis.
In this instance a small handful of leaders are directing the crowd’s collective action in confronting the police. The crowd is not deliberating, it is obeying the commands of these leaders, chanting their slogans and instructions. Watching this, I recalled the children’s game, “Simon says,” in which one person instructs the group in a series of silly actions, and tries to trip them up by slipping in a command without first saying, “Simon says.” In the UC protest, the group leaders’ voices were recognized as “Simon says,” and the voices of the police were not. The crowd follows their Simons with near robotic obedience, although a few of the wiser ones have enough sense to know that their Simons are putting them in danger, and get themselves out of harm’s way.
More importantly, perhaps, this scene illustrates a process Rene Girard describes as “mimetic contagion.” “Mimetic” refers to imitation. The leaders are focusing a group’s attention on a common enemy, in this case the police. The group literally imitates and acts out the words of its leaders. The group finds its unity not so much in shared ideals as in the identification of a common enemy. Girard observes that one of the greatest achievements of western civilization has been the establishment of the rule of law and its accoutrements, including a near-universally respected judicial system and police force. In effect, by identifying the police as their common enemy, the group aims its attack at this core of civilization. This has been a common theme of the occupy movement, particularly in its insistence that laws intended for the common good, most notably laws enforcing public health practices and prohibiting camping in urban public spaces, ought not apply to OWS demonstrators. I’ll be writing more about Girard’s mimetic theory in future posts.
The NPR narrator sums up the grand, egalitarian principle that supposedly guides the OWS use of mic check:
It was the process of working as a group, building consensus, and listening to every word everyone had to say that was most important to them.
“Listening to every word everyone had to say.” Apparently we must take the term “everyone” with a shaker-full of salt. The article concludes with this sparkling example of consensus building and listening to every word everyone has to say:
Protesters have taken their call-and-response to disrupt public meetings and events. Newt Gingrich recently got mic-checked.
As he introduced the Gingrich Productions’ film City Upon on a Hill, someone called out, “Mic-check!” A crowd repeated, and the protester then said, “We love you Newt … thank you for standing up for corporations.”
Michele Bachmann also got mic-checked, as did President Obama on a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire.
So then, “mic check” is not about “listening to what everyone has to say,” after all. One can’t know, I suppose, whether the writer of the piece recognizes the disjunction here. But clearly the leaders of this “decentralized” movement use “mic check” to guide and direct their willing mob to instruct them in what and how to think, what to say, to whom to listen, and whom to ignore or disrupt.
The story concludes:
Occupiers say the people’s mic is coming to a shareholder’s meeting or public event near you.
I can’t wait.
They don’t spell this out, but the Sheila Nicholls quoted above is also an awesome singer-songwriter (and streaker) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pro87Ihm2L0
Obviously I don’t know if this is the same person, but as the video says it’s from 2001 and she’s listed in the article as being 41, she could be.
So I see that you are “not so sure” about whether non-leaders can make use of this technique. So your distrust of this is reason enough to presume it isn’t so, regardless of what people who have been in the camps have seen and experienced.
I absolutely agree that using this technique to shout down people or disrupt police action is wrong. In that context it works against those who are using it.
But presuming that because a technique has been misused, it can’t or isn’t ever properly used is just inaccurate.
Also it is true that there are people in camps that disregard the law and bait the police, but there are also camps that have worked very hard to follow the law and obey sanitation and public health laws.
I think that you are overgeneralizing, and it doesn’t serve your argument. I’d be happy to introduce you to a friend of mine who is involved in Occupy Olympia if you’d like to gather more information about what a particular Occupy group does or doesn’t do.
I think labeling a movement like this a “willing mob” because of bad decisions made by small subsets of people in several instances is a bad call. The big picture is much larger and less conveniently demonizable.
When a group, such as the one in Olympia, is camping in violation of the law, then the whole camp and all its campers are in violation of the law. This remains the case even when the civil authorities choose to allow them temporarily to ignore the law. There have been reports from several major cities that the camps, when forced to disband, have left behind tons of waste. While it’s possible that some of the smaller groups have done a decent job in maintaining public health while in violation of public health laws, many have not. It’s not a question of a few bad actors, but of the consequences of widespread disobedience of laws intended to protect the public.
There is of course a long history of civil disobedience in service of various worthy causes. But one of the principles of civil disobedience is that the demonstrator intentionally places him/herself in jeopardy of the civil authority. If the public judges that the cause is more just than the laws being violated or protested, eventually changes in the law can take place. The most notable example of this in the US is the civil rights movement which resulted in the civil rights act of 1964. Many people went to jail in service of that cause.
I think there is a small but significant general difference between my use of the word “mob” in this post and your inference about it. I was taught in my public school days that the rule of law was a counter to “mob rule.” That is, the rule of law says that a large group of people ought not to be able to do whatever they want simply by virtue of being a large group. I’ve read in the mainstream liberal punditry several articles wistfully wishing that millions of people might pour into the streets. This was a common theme during the early days of the so-called Arab Spring. This, by the way, is the apparent hope behind the Occupy movement’s self-identification as the ninety-nine percent. I have heard several of the demonstrators claim that they speak for all but the super-rich, whether the rest of us accept this or not. The leaders of the Occupy movement, when pressed to articulate what they want, say that they want the “movement” to grow, to have thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions join them in the streets. This is a desire for mob rule, a desire to overthrow the existing order, as established in the rule of law. I’ve also heard this articulated directly: “It’s time to tear down the whole system and start over.”
Finally, even though your friend, and perhaps thousands of other occupy participants might believe themselves to be a part of a decentralized, leaderless movement, this is just not the case. The movement was started by the leaders of a Marxist publication in Canada. I heard the magazine’s publisher a couple days ago on NPR, plotting out what he expected to happen in the spring. Thus, I think my description of these occupy protesters as a “willing mob” is accurate.